The Internet has presented an ability to collect enormous amounts of detailed data about people that was previously unattainable from just offline sources. While data collected both online and offline provides rich information useful for analytics, marketing, advertising, and other purposes, the data collection and usage presents serious concerns related to the rights, obligations, and restrictions related to the data. For instance, a variety of legal and contractual restrictions may apply to data collection and usage. Legal restrictions are numerous and nuanced, varying widely by region, while contractual restrictions vary greatly among data sources, including different data collection and sharing contracts, privacy policies and settings, and consumer opt-outs.
Given the vast amount and variety of data collected both online and offline and the varying restrictions that apply, complying with such restrictions has proven to be a difficult task. Analytics applications and other types of digital marketing applications that collect data are typically responsible stewards of their own data since the applicable restrictions are generally well-known for a given set of use cases. However, the problem is exacerbated when data is combined or shared among applications, or in a centralized repository (e.g., a “cloud data platform”). In particular, it has become commonplace for applications that use data to obtain the data from various sources, such as third-party data providers, advertising ecosystem participants, offline customer relationship management (CRM) and point of sale (POS) systems. Each of these data sources may have different restrictions affecting usage of the data. An application receiving such data may not have a good understanding of these restrictions. As a result, this sharing and combination of data could result in improper, unexpected, or unauthorized use of data. Recognition of the major constraints involved in data usage is problematic, as is sharing those constraints with the broader digital marketing ecosystem.